links of the day

Walt Mossberg’s Top 12 Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews

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Walt Mossberg has been covering technology for The Wall Street Journal for 22 years. In his last column for the newspaper, he compiles 12 products which, in his opinion, have been the most influential in the last twenty years.

His criteria for selection:

First, the products had to improve ease of use and add value for average consumers. That was the guiding principle I laid down in the first sentence of my first column, in 1991: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.”

Second, I chose these 12 because each changed the course of digital history by influencing the products and services that followed, or by changing the way people lived and worked. In some cases, the impact of these mass-market products is still unfolding. All of these products had predecessors, but they managed to take their categories to a new level.

Unsurprisingly, Apple (the company) takes 5 of the 12 spots. I have used every product/service on the list with the exception of the Newton and the Palm Pilot. If it were me, I would have added one more service which has changed how I have looked into traveling: AirBnb, which allows you to rent out spaces in other people’s apartments/homes. I’ve saved hundreds of dollars by paying a fraction of the cost of hotel rooms in the last three years during my trips to Portland, Oregon.

Crazy Ants are Insane

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I meant to highlight this fascinating piece in The New York Times earlier, but better late than never.

First, the name:

The ants are called crazy ants. That’s their actual name. Many people call them Rasberry crazy ants, and some people call them Tawny crazy ants and refuse to call them Rasberry crazy ants. 

Rasberry coming from not a scientist or a professor, but an exterminator who noticed these wild ants in Texas.

Rasberry crazy ants do not have a painful bite, but they effectively terrorize people by racing up their feet and around their bodies, coursing everywhere in their impossibly disordered orbits. (They’re called crazy ants because their behavior seems psychotic.) Some people in Texas have become so frustrated with crazy ants that they have considered selling their houses or been driven to the verge of divorce. “Usually, the husband doesn’t think it’s such a big deal, and the wife is going batty,” one exterminator explained. An attorney living on an infested farm south of Houston told me: “It reminds me of the scenes in Africa, where you see flies crawling all over people. Occasionally they’ll knock one off, but for the most part they’re so accustomed to it that they finally give up.”

Crazy ants decimate native insects. They overtake beehives and destroy the colonies. They may smother bird chicks struggling to hatch. In South America, where scientists now believe the ants originated, they have been known to obstruct the nasal cavities of chickens and asphyxiate the birds. They swarm into cows’ eyes.

So far, there is no way to contain them. In the fall, when the temperature drops, the worker ants are subject to magnificent die-offs, but the queens survive, and a new, often larger crop of crazy ants pours back in the following spring. Rasberry crazy ants were first discovered in Texas by an exterminator in 2002. Within five years, they appeared to be spreading through the state much faster than even the red imported fire ant has. The fire ant is generally considered one of the worst invasive species in the world. The cost of fire ants to Texas has been estimated at more than $1 billion a year.

Here is a three-year old video that shows how fast these crazy ants scurry about:

 

Definitely worth reading the entire thing. Fascinating reporting. And scary how species can be so invasive!

The Future of Journalism is Beyoncé

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Jenna Wortham, a technology reporter for The New York Times, writes in Nieman Journalism Lab that the future of journalism is Beyoncé. Say what? As she says, stick with her:

Beyoncé completely upended the conventional model by which major album releases are released by the sheer amount of material that she airdropped simultaneously — more than a dozen new songs and videos for each — is unprecedented.

Her strategy, and its success, could shine a light on what consumers want and what is possible for all content creators, entertainers and publishers alike, in the future. It’s important to note that Bey’s strategy isn’t popular in a commercial sense — brick-and-mortar retailers like Target have promised not going to sell her album because it was available digitally before it was made available physically, which feels like an egregious error on their part, given the overall popularity of the album — but Bey’s earns points with me for not afraid to upset the incumbents to experiment with something new…

Her fans weren’t barraged by a series of advertisement and reminders about her coming album for months before it saw the light of day. They were thrilled by the surprise and can’t get enough of it.

I saw the news of Beyoncé’s release of the album shortly after midnight on Thursday. It took me a few days, but I downloaded the album this week and have been listening to it as I work out in the gym. It is very good. It’s also the most I’ve ever spent on an album, but the inclusion of a number of videos was the selling point for me (and made it worth the cost).

What Mike Tyson Is Reading

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Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mike Tyson wants you to be aware of his erudite side:

I’m currently reading “The Quotable Kierkegaard,” edited by Gordon Marino, a collection of awesome quotes from that great Danish philosopher. (He wanted his epitaph to read: “In yet a little while / I shall have won; / Then the whole fight / Will all at once be done.”) I love reading philosophy. Most philosophers are so politically incorrect—challenging the status quo, even challenging God. Nietzsche’s my favorite. He’s just insane. You have to have an IQ of at least 300 to truly understand him. Apart from philosophy, I’m always reading about history. Someone very wise once said the past is just the present in funny clothes. I read everything about Alexander, so I downloaded “Alexander the Great: The Macedonian Who Conquered the World” by Sean Patrick. Everyone thinks Alexander was this giant, but he was really a runt. “I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity,” he said. I so related to that, coming from Brownsville, Brooklyn.

What did I have to look forward to—going in and out of prison, maybe getting shot and killed, or just a life of scuffling around like a common thief? Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, even a cold pimp like Iceberg Slim—they were all mama’s boys. That’s why Alexander kept pushing forward. He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother. In general, I’m a sucker for collections of letters. You think you’ve got deep feelings? Read Napoleon’s love letters to Josephine. It’ll make you think that love is a form of insanity. Or read Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband before she loaded her coat up with stones and drowned herself in a river. I don’t really do any light reading, just deep, deep stuff. I’m not a light kind of guy.

I prefer to read the deep, deep stuff as well. Mike Tyson, you have (marginally) redeemed yourself.

Facebook Knows Your Thoughts Even When You Don’t Share

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A fascinating post on Slate explains how your unfinished thoughts on Facebook may be monitored by Facebook’s algorithms. Have you ever composed a status update, only decided to not click on publish? Gmail and other email clients do store your drafts, but it is unexpected (and not wholly beneficial) why Facebook would do that too.  The two people behind the “self-censorship” study are Sauvik Das, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist. Slate summarizes:

It is not clear to the average reader how this data collection is covered by Facebook’s privacy policy. In Facebook’s Data Use Policy, under a section called “Information we receive and how it is used,” it’s made clear that the company collects information you choose to share or when you “view or otherwise interact with things.” But nothing suggests that it collects content you explicitly don’t share. Typing and deleting text in a box could be considered a type of interaction, but I suspect very few of us would expect that data to be saved. When I reached out to Facebook, a representative told me that the company believes this self-censorship is a type of interaction covered by the policy.

In their article, Das and Kramer claim to only send back information to Facebook that indicates whether you self-censored, not what you typed. The Facebook rep I spoke with agreed that the company isn’t collecting the text of self-censored posts. But it’s certainly technologically possible, and it’s clear that Facebook is interested in the content of your self-censored posts. Das and Kramer’s article closes with the following: “we have arrived at a better understanding of how and where self-censorship manifests on social media; next, we will need to better understand what and why.” This implies that Facebook wants to know what you are typing in order to understand it. The same code Facebook uses to check for self-censorship can tell the company what you typed, so the technology exists to collect that data it wants right now.

Revealing and very troubling, especially how prevalent the behavior is. From the paper:

We found that 71% of the 3.9 million users in our sample self-censored at least one post or comment over the course of 17 days, confirming that self-censorship is common. Posts are censored more than comments (33% vs. 13%).

The Best Books Bill Gates Read in 2013

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I am a fan of the end-of-year lists, and this one from Bill Gates on the best books he’s read this year, is excellent:

  • The Box, by Marc Levinson. You might think you don’t want to read a whole book about shipping containers. And Levinson is pretty self-aware about what an unusual topic he chose. But he makes a good case that the move to containerized shipping had an enormous impact on the global economy and changed the way the world does business. And he turns it into a very readable narrative. I won’t look at a cargo ship in quite the same way again.
  • The Most Powerful Idea in the World, by William Rosen. A bit like The Box, except it’s about steam engines. Rosen weaves together the clever characters, incremental innovations, and historical context behind this invention. I’d wanted to know more about steam engines since the summer of 2009, when my son and I spent a lot of time hanging out at the Science Museum in London.
  • Harvesting the Biosphere, by Vaclav Smil. There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil. Here he gives as clear and as numeric a picture as is possible of how humans have altered the biosphere. The book is a bit dry and I had to look up a number of terms that were unfamiliar to me, but it tells a critical story if you care about the impact we’re having on the planet.
  • The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Diamond. It’s not as good as Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. But then, few books are. Diamond finds fascinating anecdotes about what life is like for hunter-gatherers and asks which ones might apply to our modern lifestyles. He doesn’t make some grand pronouncement or romanticize tribal life. He just wants to find the best practices and share them.
  • Poor Numbers, by Morten Jerven. Jerven, an economist, spent four years digging into how African nations get their statistics and the challenges they face in turning them into GDP estimates. He makes a strong case that a lot of GDP measurements we thought were accurate are far from it. But as I argue in my longer review, that doesn’t mean we know nothing about what works in development.

What are the best books you’ve read this year?

On Having Fun at Work

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I am an advocate of making work fun, and this New York Times piece is a good primer on the movement:

Despite the sobering economic shocks of recent years, the Fun at Work movement seems irrepressible. Major companies boast of employing Chief Fun Officers or Happiness Engineers; corporations call upon a burgeoning industry of happiness consultants, who’ll construct a Gross Happiness Index for your workplace, then advise you on ways to boost it. (Each week, Warby Parker asks “everyone to tell their happiness rating on a scale of zero to 10,” Mr. Blumenthal explained.)

Countless self-help bloggers offer tips for generating cheer among the cubicles (“Buy donuts for everyone”; “Hang movie posters on your walls, with employees’ faces replacing those of the real movie stars”). It’s all shudderingly reminiscent of David Brent, Ricky Gervais’s wince-inducing character from the British version of “The Office”; or of the owner of the nuclear power plant in “The Simpsons” who considers distracting attention from the risk of lethal meltdowns by holding Funny Hat Days. 

However, I appreciated reading conflicting evidence as well:

The attempt to impose happiness is self-sabotaging. Psychologists have shown that positive-thinking affirmations make people with low self-esteem feel worse; that patients with panic disorders can become more anxious when they try to relax; and that an ability to experience negative emotions, rather than struggling to exclude them, is crucial for mental health. 

Man is What He Hides

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In “We Are What We Hide,” a piece about the (seemingly) double lives of Norman Rockwell, Ernest Hemingway, and J.D. Salinger, Lee Siegel concludes with, what I think, one of the best paragraphs I’ve read this week:

The miserable, repressed, cheerily idealizing Norman Rockwell is not so strange, after all. Rather, the law of opposites is a universal condition. The psyche is a clock with at least four hands that move in different directions simultaneously. We live amid the riot of our own secret counterpoints, some of which complete and fulfill our human promise, some of which betray it. As Malraux, the Resistance hero, adventurer, diplomat, and novelist, who is said to have suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, once wrote: “Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides.”

I agree with this:

But the law of opposites is too rich, too weird, too universal to be classified and dismissed as a character defect.

Worth reading.

Errol Morris on the Abraham Lincoln Portraits

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I spent the better half of the afternoon reading Errol Morris’s fascinating series “The interminable, Everlasting Lincolns” in The New York Times, in which he sets to establish how the last known photographs (portraits) of Abraham Lincoln came to be. The prologue sets the tone with a vivid dream that Lincoln presumably had a few days before his assassination, but it’s in Part I where Errol Morris comes firing:

The story of the crack, along with the original April 9 date, was printed in The New York Times on Feb. 12, 1922. O-118 was captioned: “The President Sat for This Photograph Just Five Days Before Booth Shot Him. The Cracked Negative Caused it To Be Discarded. It Has Only Once Before Been Published, and Then in a Retouched Form.” The accompanying text by James Young read:

Probably no other photograph of Lincoln conveys more clearly the abiding sadness of the face. The lines of time and care are deeply etched, and he has the look of a man bordering upon old age, though he was only 56. Proof that the camera was but a few feet away may be found by scrutiny of this picture… The print has been untouched, and this picture is an exact likeness of the President as he looked in the week of his death. [10]

——–

This is Errol Morris’s motivation for writing the series:

My fascination with the dating and interpretation of photographs is really a fascination with the push-pull of history. Facts vs. beliefs. Our desire to know the origins of things vs. our desire to rework, to reconfigure the past to suit our own beliefs and predilections. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than two radically different predispositions to objects — the storyteller vs. the collector.

lincoln-crack

The infamous “crack” photograph of Abraham Lincoln.

For the collector the image with the crack is a damaged piece of goods — the crack potentially undermining the value of the photograph as an artifact, a link to the past. The storyteller doesn’t care about the photograph’s condition, or its provenance, but about its thematic connections with events. To the storyteller, the crack is the beginning of a legend — the legend of a death foretold. The crack seems to anticipate the bullet fired into the back of Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865.

It should have a name. I call it “the proleptic crack.” 

Errol Morris continues:

Holzer’s enterprise is to weave a context — a story — around photographs and significant events in American history. If Meserve were correct — if Gardner took his photographs of Lincoln on April 10, if the negative cracked just days before Lincoln was shot — it would make for a better story. But that story, like so many “better stories,” isn’t true. 

Part II of the series is here. Parts III and Parts IV will follow soon.

###

(hat tip: @kottke)

From Training Chickens to Training Dogs

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I’ve known about the “clickers” that are used in dog training, but I had no idea the concept originated with training chickens. Modern Farmer has the details on Ryan’s Chicken Training Camps in Sequim, Washington, which attracts a number of dog trainers and other people every September:

The last decade and a half have seen their methods — most often called “clicker training” — become ubiquitous in the worlds of professional and amateur dog training. Trainers use a marker, usually a toy clicker, as a bridge between a desired behavior and the animal’s reward. “A click is like taking a picture,” explains Ryan. “It takes a shot that shows what gives the animal the reward.”

With a dog, you can take a few seconds noticing a behavior, marking it with a click and offering a treat. Man’s best friend is rather forgiving. With a chicken, the sequence needs to happen more or less instantly. When animal behaviorist Dr. Sophia Yin attended one of the Baileys’ first chicken training camps, she learned to tape a clicker to a measuring cup full of feed. She then practiced clicking, then offering the chicken a quick peck. One click dropped seed, and the chicken would go scurrying off the training table and onto the floor.

If you can train a chicken, you can train a dog:

Clicker-trained chickens can complete obstacle courses, discriminate between colors and shapes, remember routes through obstacle courses and even play simple tunes on a children’s xylophone.